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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Pictured right is the new setup that I've recently started using for development. I've found it to be much, much faster and more memory efficient than Gnome. When I'm developing, sometimes I want to run several server and/or client instances, and I need as many resources as possible, ready for crazy, unexpected usages. Window Maker fits the bill.

As a high school student in the 80s, I lusted after NeXT boxes and the look of NeXTSTEP. I had a collection of glossy pamphlets from the company that were kept out on my desk for regular ogling. The best I could do though, was incessantly use the Macs at the University of Maine at Orono (where I spent as much time as possible). When, as a new Linux user in '96 or '97, I discovered AfterStep, I switched from the Motif-alike FVWM. Immediately after Window Maker was released, I choose it as my primary window manager.

Since then, the Linux distributions and operating systems I've used have been distractingly varied. However, after several excellent years with Mac OS X, I'm actually quite happy to be back in Linux. Though I have generally enjoyed Gnome, I was really unhappy with how it seemed run rather slow, with delayed transitions between applications and other similar operations. With a new machine having 4GB of RAM, this seemed rather unnecessary. (However, I do run some heavy services on my machine... databases, web servers, etc.)

When I switched to Window Maker, I was stunned. Number one, it still works on a modern distro! Secondly, it's super fast. Finally, I *love* the clean desktop (I'm not a fan of having the desktop background display the contents of a folder). Not only that, but a quick test drive of some Python dockapp-writing software left me with some fun ideas for side-projects I could write to even better augment my working environment. (For example, dock apps for NetworkManager, update notifications, and Rhythmbox.)

Monday, January 12, 2009

I've got a fairly large collection of digital music on a networked drive, and I access it from multiple machines on the network. I consolidated it 5 years ago when I started using iTunes, and over the past few years picked up about 400 songs from the iTunes store. This is something I avoid now, since Amazon offers songs at higher bitrates and without the crippling, non-Fair Use of DRM. (Apple seems to have recently changed it's policy, though the pain their DRM crap has caused me doesn't make me a very loyal customer.)

Since I started working at Canonical, I've been using Ubuntu for more than just development -- it's my main-use machine. I still use iTunes every once in a while, but my primary media player is Rhythmbox. There are a couple of issues with the old library, though.

Obviously, Rhythmbox can't play Apple's encrypted .m4p files or a couple audio book files I have. What's more, there are about 200 files that iTunes is able to locate but which Rhythmbox cannot (this may be due to the differing case sensitivities of the respective OSs). In order to track all these issues down conveniently, I wanted to export the import errors and missing files as a text file. Sadly, Rhythmbox doesn't have this functionality.

Fortunately, it comes with a Python console :-)

The missing files export was fairly easy, after some digging around and poking at the Python objects:

Try as I might, I was completely unable to obtain similar data for the import errors. After looking at the C code, I was able to determine that though the import errors were treated generally as a media source, due to their nature (not being able to provide the actual media itself), the related meta data was handled differently. Yet I wasn't able to decipher how, exactly.

So, I hopped on their mail list and asked for help :-) After a few quick exchanges, I was pointed in the right direction by one of the developers, who said that I needed to make use of the db object and some constants. After a quick test, this advice resulted in the following:

Note that the shell and rhythmdb objects are exposed by Rhythmbox in Python console sessions.

I now have a complete list of files that either need some file name updates or need to be burned to CD in iTunes and ripped to OGG.

So far, I've been pretty pleased with Rhythmbox. Thanks to their use of Python, I find I'm now becoming somewhat of a fan :-)

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Holy old code, Batman -- it's been about 2.5 years since I first blogged about the Twisted mail server I cobbled together. In the intervening time, I've received tons of emails and instant messages requesting that the code be put up somewhere. Well, that time has come...

I recently decommissioned a box I had at tummy.com which was my primary mail server for several years. After many years of qmail and a few months with Postfix, I wanted a solution that I had more immediate control over. At that time, Gmail for Domains was just announced and I became one of the beta testers for it. However, it was missing a few critical features, so I sat down and put together a mail server for myself. Abe Fetting had some nice examples in his O'Reilly book, so I started there. Then I jumped into the Twisted source code and discovered the rest that I needed.

A year or so later, Gmail for Domains (now Google Apps for business) was rockin' out, so I started moving my mail there. I eventually aliased the remainder of my domains and then stopped using the Twisted mail server. I kept the tummy.com box around for a while for DNS, but due to a tightening of the budget at home, I later had to pull the plug. When I reviewed the backup files from the server, I saw the old mail code and put it at the top of the list for my down-time projects.

There are a couple non-standard parts of the code (in particular, the account, alias, and mail list management), but it can be improved very easily. The Dspam stuff was nascent at best (I didn't end up using it in production). Also, the relaying really needs to be looked into to make sure that it's done safely. A quick task someone could jump on right away is to convert the copious print statments to twisted.python.log calls.

Having the code in the state that it's in could be a lot of fun, really. The code base is tiny and there's nothing too tricky going on. For those that haven't had a chance to play with Bazaar, you can easily branch it to your own lp home dir, and if you make some cool improvements, I can easily merge those back in to the main branch. Looking at the list of branches, potential users and developers will be able to easily see the efforts that others have made. txMailServer could end up being a nice little piece of utilitarian code for folks...